Lo and Behold!

Eugene V. Thaw Recalls His Collaboration with a Legendary Restorer

As a dealer, did you have any sure-fire methods to pique a client’s interest in a painting?

One of the techniques I employed was to sell a picture hot off the restorer’s easel, at the very moment he was cleaning a little piece of it and opening up what we call a window. It was high drama, let me tell you—from under the tarnished coating and the centuries of grime, colors that had gone dull or dark came back to life before the client’s eyes. The restorer I worked with the most actively was in fact the greatest practitioner of the 20th century: Mario Modestini, a completely self-taught virtuoso who’d grown up in Rome on the Via Margutta when it was still the street of artists and who played a tremendous role in many very famous pictures by the rarest masters. He would stand at the easel by the huge window in his studio on East 52nd Street, with the good north light, and perform his periodic miracles. He had some kind of stick—sometimes it was just a pair of tweezers—that he wrapped cotton around the end of, like a swab, you know; and he had a table full of solvents and also some unguents of his own creation.

Yes, just 15 months short of his 100th birthday. Astonishingly, he had changed hardly at all in all the years I knew him, this bald-headed, slightly rotund man. Mario had an aura about him—even in restaurants they would call him maestro. He continued to restore paintings until he was in his early 90s, and he drove till he was 95—very well, I might add. A beautiful Mercedes.

What was it that brought him to the United States?

No less a connoisseur than Bernard Berenson had recommended him to Rush Kress to be the curator and conservator of the 2,000-odd paintings owned by the Kress Foundation, and Mario served in these capacities from 1949 until the final dispersal of the pictures in 1961 to our National Gallery of Art and other, regional museums. He also worked closely then and later with the National Gallery on a lot of the greatest things they have there. But he wasn’t just a person whose judgment you trusted when you needed to have a picture cleaned, he was somebody whose advice you asked—and invariably acted on—as to whether a picture was authentic or not. When Knoedler Galleries offered the Kress Foundation the lost early Caravaggio Cardsharps, Mario went to see it with the director of the National Gallery at the time, John Walker. The painting was known from a French photograph of the early 1900s. Well, Mario looked at the photo and then at the picture and said, “This is not the picture in the photo—there are subtle differences in the angle of the cards.” Which nobody else had noticed, and when he pointed it out, this copy disappeared from the market—the real one, by the way, turned up 30 years later. Mario was absolutely incorruptible; no one could ever bribe him or anything like that—he wasn’t for sale.

Tell me about some of your own dealings with Modestini.

The first important old master I ever sold—the Tiepolo oil sketch The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra, which I’d bought from Baron Philippe de Rothschild of Château Mouton Rothschild réclame—I sold on Mario’s easel. To Charles Wrightsman. As Mario opened a “window” in the sky, Wrightsman stood there marveling at how quickly the varnish had come off; and since the picture was revealed to be in mint condition, it was perfectly safe for him to proceed to clean any part that Wrightsman would point to. In the weeks that followed, Wrightsman and his wife, Jayne, would pick me up in their limousine, which as I recall was either a Chrysler or a Cadillac, dark brown or black and brown—definitely a customized paint job—and we would motor on down to 52nd Street to see what progress Mario had made on their Tiepolo.

What other art did Modestini work his art on for you?

In the early 1970s, in partnership with both the old-master dealer Rudolph Heinemann and Knoedler’s, I bought the Goya portrait of the French general Nicolas Philippe Guye from Ruth Field, Mrs. Marshall Field III, for $500,000—one of the biggest deals I had made up until that time. After hanging in her apartment for so many years with tobacco and candle smoke and fireplace soot and pollution and what have you, it needed to have its surface enriched, so I gave it to Mario. Then, in the interest of facilitating an eventual sale, I invited to his studio America’s great Goya expert, Miss Eleanor Sayre of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, who was, by the way, the granddaughter of Woodrow Wilson. She had always doubted this picture, insisting it didn’t have a certain halo of transparency coming from behind the figure’s edges that was characteristic of Goya. Mind you, it was in all the books—documented all the way back to Goya’s own time. This woman was the lone holdout, but she was the one whom American museums consulted, and a black mark from her could queer the pitch on any sale. Mario began to clean it, and when she saw the missing aura reappearing through the varnish, she got down on her knees and nearly kissed the canvas, saying, “It is a Goya—and a marvelous one.” Now, not every curator is willing to admit a mistake—they can be terribly turf-conscious—but she had moral integrity.

I guess she wasn’t Woodrow Wilson’s granddaughter for nothing.

I was then able to sell it—for a million-two, I think it was—to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which needed a great old master to pump things up. And a million-two was a nice price at that time…. Restoring, you know, is practically a lost art. It’s now pretty much in the hands of well-meaning people who don’t necessarily love and understand paintings. They can be relied on to know all about chemistry and scientific apparatus and that sort of thing, but they don’t really know why a Titian or a Velázquez or a Rembrandt looks the way it does. The greatness of Mario was that he was in perfect sympathy with the artist’s sensibility and could interpret his intention. I mean, a painting is a mode of expression, and unless it expresses the same thing after restoration as it did when it was first done, you’ve distorted or violated it in some way.

I’s been said that there are two ways to ruin a painting—one of them is not to restore it and the other is to restore it.

Except that Mario was someone who approached every painting with respect and even humility. He was extremely prudent when it came to the cleaning—he always knew just when to stop—and he kept his varnishes to a minimum, which accounts in part for the incredible longevity of most of his restorations.

Did he ever work on anything younger than an old master?

He showed me the Van Gogh Irises in his studio. There was no thought of it coming up for sale—Joan Whitney Payson, who owned it, was still alive. To show me a great picture like that was a pleasure to him: He knew that I would appreciate it as a work of art, not as a piece of advantage to be used in the market or anything. Van Gogh worked with thick paint, with the oil in it, right from the tube, and it had enough of a sheen to it itself. But a dealer somewhere down the line must have had it varnished, overextending that sheen, and the varnish had gotten dirty—to the point where there was imminent danger of paint loss because cracks were coming up pretty strongly. But when Mario was through cleaning it, the whole palette was in its original high key—bright and fresh the way it all should be in an Impressionist masterpiece. He had succeeded in restoring to the picture its unvarnished truth.

Didn’t the irises eventually sell for the world-record price at the time?

In 1987, yes—for almost $50 million. And speaking of high prices, one day in the early 1970s, Norton Simon called me at home to ask what was the best picture available in the world. Mario had just told me that the Wildenstein Gallery had a recently authenticated Raphael, one of the great early Madonnas—I assumed that he had cleaned it for them and that that was how he knew about it. He said they weren’t ready to sell it yet: It hadn’t matured enough or whatever—they’re a very secretive firm, and they must have had their own reasons for holding it back. It was in storage, in a vault very deep inside a former iron mine in a mountain up on the Hudson, known simply as the iron mountain. This vault was fireproof, waterproof, bombproof, what Mario used to call “every-proof”—these were the days, remember, when people were worried about atomic attack and all of that. Anyway, Norton had so much clout with Wildenstein’s, from having bought quite a few Degas and other things of theirs, that when he threatened to never buy another picture from them unless they sold him this Raphael, they acquiesced. The three million he paid for it was then a near-record price…. I brought Mario along when Stavros Niarchos, who had heard that I was supposed to be a reliable and scholarly dealer as opposed to just a commercial one, invited me up to his apartment at 820 Fifth Avenue to see his great collection and tell him what I thought ought to be cleaned. They were almost exactly the same age, and they got along like houses on fire. It turned out that Mario had already cleaned, when it was with Wildenstein’s, one of Niarchos’s favorite pictures, the El Greco that he used to keep on his yacht. We walked through the apartment and Mario would say about certain Van Goghs, “This one please don’t clean, leave it alone—it’s fine the way it is.” And yet, another picture there, a Gauguin, he did go on to clean, and it came out splendidly—a big change—so you know, he could, with his X-ray eyes, foresee a result.

What was the most celebrated painting he evaluated in his career?

Far and away, the Ginevra de’ Benci—the first of only three known portraits of women painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The ruling family of the principality of Liechtenstein, which had owned it for centuries, put it up for sale, and Paul Mellon and the National Gallery dispatched Mario to Vaduz to examine it. He concluded not only that it was authentic but that its very slightly discolored varnish was acceptable, that touching it at all could be going too far—he didn’t feel, you see, that he had to get his hands on everything, as a notch in his belt. On his say-so, they bought it for what was in 1967 the all-time record—five million dollars. Then they commissioned the design of this unique valise that could simulate the temperature and humidity of the wine cellar in the castle where the picture was stored and maintain them for up to 12 hours—which was just enough time to get Ginevra to the National Gallery, where a room with the same temperature and humidity had been prepared. Mario bought that valise a first-class ticket on Swissair under the name of “Mrs. Modestini” and placed it—most uxoriously, you can be sure—on the seat beside him, with the belt around it. That night it became the only Leonardo painting in the Western Hemisphere—it’s been dubbed America’s Mona Lisa.

Quite by coincidence, I happen to know a little something about that trip. Rush Kress’s daughter Jocelyn is an old friend of mine, and she once told me how, walking to her seat on a New York-bound flight from Zurich, she was startled to see the man who had restored all her family’s pictures sitting there handcuffed to a piece of luggage. she said she kidded him, “what is it you have there, Mario? a Leonardo?” and that he said, smiling, “as a matter of fact, Jocelyn, it is.”

Interesting. I never heard the part about the handcuffs.

What remain modestini’s greatest triumphs of restoration?

Rubens’s self-portrait with his wife and son—one of the great pictures in the Met. Also in the Met, the El Greco altarpiece The Vision of Saint John, which had been badly crumpled when it was used as a curtain in a Spanish convent—Mario restored it over a period of about six months, using the new resins and doing some of his most beautiful and accurate retouching. He was also frequently called on to correct the unfortunate restorations of others. It was Mario who saved the Gerbier Family from looking embarrassing—that Rubens group portrait in the National Gallery that had been cleaned right down to its underpaint. He did what he could for it, pulling it together enough so that it was exhibitable.

Did you ever go around museums with him and hear his take on various cleanings and restorations?

His widow, Dianne, who is herself a very good restorer—she teaches at the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU and is passing on a lot of Mario’s secrets to the students—described a visit they made when he was in his late 80s to the National Gallery in London, which has a history of radical overcleaning of masterpieces. She said that Mario felt several of the pictures had been scrubbed so mercilessly they looked positively flayed; all the mystery and poetry were gone from them, and he began to cry. He said to her, “Please take me out of here.” So she took him back to their hotel, and he went on crying for half an hour—he just kept shaking his head and saying, “What I saw! What I saw!”